The following description of related art is intended to provide background information pertaining to the field of the present disclosure. This section may include certain aspects of the art that may be related to various aspects of the present disclosure. However, it should be appreciated that this section be used only to enhance the understanding of the reader with respect to the present disclosure, and not as admissions of prior art.
With the tremendous amount of information made available on the World Wide Web, the need for effective methods for retrieving relevant information in response to search queries has also increased. Typically, a search engine is used to provide search results in response to a search query input by the user. The value of a search engine depends on the relevance of the results it produces. While there are numerous web pages that comprise a particular word or phrase, some pages may be more relevant, popular, or authoritative than others, and such pages must be provided in the search results. Different search engines employ different methods to uncover and subsequently rank and provide search results to users.
Existing web search engines store information about many web pages that are retrieved by a crawler. Typically, a crawler follows every link on each web page on the World Wide Web and stores or saves these pages and/or their content in an index. The purpose of an index is to allow information to be retrieved as quickly as possible when a search is performed. When a user enters keywords into a search engine, the engine examines its index, looks for the words or clusters of words as entered, and provides a list of matching information according to its algorithms and criteria, usually by way of a digest containing the title, parts of the text, design, colour etc.
Electronic commerce (e-commerce) websites also allow users to search for different items on their websites using a search engine. A user may wish to view or retrieve items similar to the item currently being viewed. This functionality is also provided for by the search engines of these e-commerce websites, however, searching for similar items is done in the same manner as discussed above, i.e. by searching for keywords input by the user in an index. The main drawback of existing web search engines, and particularly those used on e-commerce websites, is that for every new search, the engine starts searching from the beginning of the index which slows down the process of retrieving information and in some cases, the retrieved information is not accurate, relevant or as per the expectation of the user. Further, the existing systems are capable of executing a single search query at a time, i.e. the index can be searched for only one search query at a time, resulting in increased processing time of the search queries.